Introduction: What is user adoption?

User adoption is a concept that is often overlooked in the excitement of introducing Zendesk to your team. It may be obvious to you, the Zendesk admin, how this new software is going to make your teams’ jobs easier, but it’s not always obvious to your staff. In fact, many software implementations fail because managers and decision-makers neglect one simple fact about their staff: they’re human, and humans abhor change. My colleague Rav Dhaliwal put it this way: the only person who likes change is a wet baby.

User adoption is less about the specific tool you introduce to your team, and more about encouraging positive behavioral change in your environment. Common issues that undermine successful user adoption can include:

Lack of communication about the new software system

Unclear objectives for making the change

No incentives for changing tools (aka “what’s in it for me?”)

An absence of system ownership, leaving staff unsure of who can help them

You can avoid some of these pitfalls by being transparent both internally and externally, and you can start by getting your team on board. In Part 1, I'll share some ways you can get your team excited about adopting Zendesk, and Part 2 will share some tips for helping your customers get used to your new system, too. Part 3 will cover ways you can keep your agent and customer engagement with your Zendesk strong.

While this discussion will at times take a high-level view of user adoption in general, I’ll also provide examples for applying these principles to your Zendesk launch.

Part 1: Get your staff on board

Your team - your agents in Zendesk - are the most important piece of the user adoption puzzle. Without their buy-in, your new tool will gather dust on the digital shelf while your staff retreats to old, familiar methods of getting their jobs done - even if those methods are inefficient and cumbersome (I’m looking at you, email).

Here are some things to consider when introducing your team to your new Zendesk platform:

Communicate early and often. When you’ve made the decision to introduce Zendesk, let staff know about the decision, and talk about how it addresses your team’s pain points. Be sure to let everyone know about upcoming training and rollout schedules, too.

Get executive sponsorship. Is your boss using Zendesk? Are you using Zendesk? Lead by example. Executive support and heavy usage factors highly in ensuring your team gets on board, too.

Involve the team in the workflow building process. If you’ve got a large team, choose one agent (perhaps a team lead) to represent everyone. Talk about what’s currently working for them, and what they’d like to change. This way everyone feels like their voice and concerns have a seat at the table.

Training, training, training! Get your agents the information they need to feel comfortable with Zendesk. Emphasize what’s familiar, and present process and workflow changes in a positive light. Most of all, explain why - when we know why a change is occurring, we’re more likely to go along with it. Leverage the
agent guide
in our forums, or take advantage of our new free, self-guided
Zendesk Essentials for Agents
online training course at Zendesk University.

Pick a clear cut-off date for when you will stop using your old system. Make sure to provision your agents with their Zendesk user accounts and give plenty of product training beforehand so that they feel confident about making the switch. Having a clear cut-off date also works if you’re approaching your Zendesk launch in phases (for example, getting your support team into Zendesk first, and then your accounting team). You’ll just need to set a cut-off for each phase. Bonus - you can leverage agent experience from phase 1 to help train and transition agents in phase 2, and so on.

Check in and support your team. Let them know you’ve got their back! Shadow your agents and make yourself available for any and all questions on the first day or week of your launch.

Have fun! Incentivize your agents! Consider creating a Zendesk scavenger hunt - a simple set of questions for tasks and workflows your agents will need to know. Reward early adopters and promoters in a way that’s appropriate for your office culture - a free lunch, some sweet office swag, anything that will motivate them.

What do you think? Leave a comment sharing how your team successfully introduced Zendesk to your agents.

Part 2: Get your customers on board

Getting your customers to use your new Zendesk may require less change management on your end - it all depends on what you plan to implement for them. Customers are people too, and people dislike change. Just remember that your customers are the most important part of your business, so it’s equally important to consider their positive adoption of your Zendesk - after all, without them, your business wouldn’t be here!

Even if you don’t plan to change how your customers get in touch with you, you should still let them know that you’re introducing a new system internally. For example, if you’re switching to Zendesk to manage your customer service interactions, but only accepting requests via email, you could simply set up email forwarding for your current support email address - your customers would still use the same address to get in touch with you, but your agents would now be working in Zendesk. Think about how things may change for your customers after the switch: will email notifications look different? Will they receive more or fewer notifications? Keep these changes in mind and alert your customers to what’s coming.

Here are some tips for introducing Zendesk to your customers:

Design with your customer in mind. Think about the ways that customers interact with your team, and what they’re currently experiencing when they do so. (Consider customer journey mapping as an exercise in a larger
customer experience
investment initiative.) Once you’ve got a clear idea of the customer experience with your team, you can design your support processes, email notifications, and Help Center to make that experience better.

Communicate early and often. If you’re changing the way customers get in touch with you, start letting them know sooner rather than later. Include a blurb about it in your email signature. As your agents start using Zendesk, include a link to your Help Center in the
agent signature
. Work with your marketing team to create an announcement with links to send out via your social media channels, and add a mention to your main web site.

Pick a clear cut-off date. Let your customers know when you’re shutting your old system down, and how to get in touch with you when that happens.

Training, training, training! If you’re changing the way customers get in touch with you, provide training materials to illustrate how to submit a request. Feel free to use our
End-user guide
to help familiarize your customers with the system.
Pro Tip
: Use your Help Center to create articles about how to use the Help Center!

Use web forms for support requests. Using a Submit a Request form enables you to collect specific information up front and potentially cut down on back-and-forth between your agents and your customers, thus hastening ticket resolution times. Help drive awareness and use of the form by adding
Web Widgets
wherever you can on your web site: your homepage, sales page, contact page, etc. You can configure the Web Widget to also suggest articles from your Help Center, which can help increase awareness of your knowledge base.

Trying to move away from accepting email requests? Push your customers to your Submit a Request form by setting up a trigger that will automatically reply to all new email tickets with a link to your Help Center and/or your Submit a Request form. The trigger can also automatically close those tickets so your agents never even see them.

Are you introducing a knowledge base? The best way to increase awareness and drive traffic to your new knowledge base is to link to it anywhere and everywhere you can--especially where your customers are. Read our
best practices article
for more tips.

Incentivize your customers! Reward promoters and active forum participants within your community with company swag, gift cards, or simply recognition in your forums, documentation, and social media, e.g. “Great tip from Bob today in our forums!”

What have you done to ensure your customers have an easy transition from your old system to your Zendesk? Let us know in the comments below!

Part 3: Keep the ball rolling

User adoption doesn’t stop as soon as you launch your Zendesk. Post-implementation planning and support is crucial to ensure smooth sailing. Now that you’ve got everyone on board, it’s time to think about maintaining that adoption in the long term. Here are some ideas:

For your customers:

Foster customer engagement with small changes to your Help Center landing page or with different questions in their ticket submission forms.

Keep supporting your team. Enroll yourself and/or your team in
Zendesk University
training. Have a follow-up lunch-and-learn with your agents every so often to talk about what’s working and what might need tweaking.

Measure success
. Define clear metrics, and use Zendesk’s reporting tools to show your staff how much their performance improves. You’ll also be able to measure who’s not performing so well, and may need additional training or encouragement.

In our product we provide "contact support" links that generate emails to our support alias. We're considering changing those to links to a ticket submission form so we can collect more information up front and avoid iterating just to gather the facts.

However, many people here are concerned that we'd get less contacts as people might pass on filling in the form. Do you have any data to show that ticket volume is not impacted by such a change? Probably it is hard to attribute volumes with a change in the submission method, but wanted to ask in case this is something you've already examined.

@Bill - while I don't personally have any data to share, I hope someone from the Zendesk community who has made such a change can share their experience with you. We do consider it a best practice to use ticket submission forms with required fields to collect necessary information up front - as you say, this avoids back-and-forth ticket interactions just to gather facts. I recommend downloading the Zendesk Customer Service Benchmark to learn more about what makes customers happiest - you'll find that quicker resolutions lead to happier customers. The faster you can get your agents the info they need to solve an issue, the happier your customers will be with the results!

Bill, every customer is different. I am an email centric sort of person so when I log a ticket with Zendesk, I just email them. However as an admin for a helpdesk, I wish everyone would use a webform as this provides us with more information up front. I have done as much as I can to make the form simple but effective but I know that even though email is evil, I just will not eradicate it. So I agree with the idea of using an automated response to take the customer to somewhere that they may find more beneficial next time. We are experimenting with using prediction software to assess the incoming email and ultimately provide links back to the customer that are directly related to their query. This is better than dumping them at a search page. We are not there yet but hopefully over the next few weeks we will have something in place. I personally think that the solution to needing more information is actually to give customers the ability to help themselves.

@Bill - I can tell you when we first moved our support desk to Zendesk, 99.9% of our submissions were to contact support via email. Over the last 2 years, those numbers have shifted, and about 40% now come from our help desk, and 45% come from direct email with the balance coming from social media. That is strictly a natural shift, as we still display our support email address on our corporate site. Our ticket numbers took a slight dip when we launched our help center, which I attributed to the fact that they could now search and self-help, as our form is pretty short, and I don't think it's a turn-off. I also think people expect to fill out a form of some type when submitting, and the initial information gathered can really help you be more efficient with your tickets.

In her 1pm update, Lisa mentioned a follow-up lunch-and-learn with your agents every so often, I wholeheartedly agree. Needs change but actually your ability to come up with new ways of doing things also improves as time goes by. We have been live now for just over 12 months and what I have today is very different to the original implementation. Your agents will often not understand the the capabilities so you need to inspire them. I would recommend you read the articles on how Zendesk uses their own product - share these articles around. Just recently I have been talking with one department head about replacing some other tool with some workflow in Zendesk. At the outset that wasn't even a dream.

@Cheryl - Our experience is like yours. Coming up on 2 years with Zendesk, and we're now getting 36% of our tickets through the web form without forcing anyone there. We made a huge investment in our Help Center over the summer, our ticket volume has remained steady while our user base has greatly increased, so I think there is some good news in there.

@Lisa - thanks for the link, and I couldn't agree more about driving for quickest possible ticket resolutions. It's a constant focus for our team.

@Colin - we're also looking at parsing the incoming emails and auto-responding with an appropriate link, with monitoring by an agent who can join the dialog at any point. Nothing live yet, but an area of investigation for us.

Andrea - I can tell you what's working with our sales agents...and presumably, a measurement goal is a measurement goal, whether it's $$$ accounts or customers served appropriately, right? As long as you are measuring something that everyone agrees is important and can be measured fairly, then you have an attainable goal.

so...what can you do when that goal is achieved...or how to help get to that?

Our current game is called "the box game". our sales agents are in a cube farm, we wear headsets, all sales are done in this room. That's important to know the environment because it's not too far off from a casual call center.

On our conference table are 4 boxes. Only one box may be in play at a time, but the agent who gets the box can swap for one on the table. The boxes contain envelopes with items like "leave 2 hours early", "pizza party for the office", "Sheetz run" (my East Coast USA folks will know about this!!!), "$25 gift card", etc.

When an agent gets a sale AND that sale is fully established in our system, they go get the box from the last person who had it. With 12 agents, we send emails. Then we can congratulate $$ earned and be competitive on who has the box. At random times during the day, mgmt folk go ring a bell. If you have the box when the bell rings, you get what's in it. You then restuff the box with a new envelope and leave it on the table.

The fun part is this:

our agents love to one-up. Agent 1 has the box...and everyone is trying to get it from him. Well that may mean that 2 others get a sale at the same time...and so Agent 2 takes the box, but has it for all of 5 minutes.

Since i'm one of the bell ringers, I can ring it up to 2x per day. I get instant messages, people at my cube, emails, etc "ring the bell". I have no idea WHO has the box...because it's not always the box holder who is asking for it!

I have a growing stash of loot from my trips to the bell as a thank you. I know by the type of thing who gave it to me. Butterfinger minis, K cups...each agent has their appropriate "Diane bucks" that they leave for me.

This was a new game for us, but it's turning out to be a lot of fun and of course our reps are figuring out all the great cheats to it....they are such creative critters. It's funny to watch as well.